my personal rig, a couple questions

I will be putting in 2x 560 Ti DS and 2 1TB HDD's

so my plan is to run the 2 ssd's in raid 0 the 2 wd's in raid 1

I like future-proof stuff and i want the best i cant get for my money, I dont mind spending the extra if the performance is there but if it is negligible I rather save it.

now my questions.....

1) I chose the 1050W because i wanted to have headroom to overclock the psu and gpu's with no worries....would 850W be okay or stick with what i got?

2) I chose the h100 cuz I have the case room and figured i'd get more performance on my i7 than the h80...am i wasting my money here or stick with my plan?

3) I chose the E-ATX mobo once again cuz of the big case and hoping it would out perform the ATX board in any way or offer anything more? is that a waste or would i yield very simillar results with the ATX board? (i dont plan on triple sli maybe a dedicated physx but i doubt it)

4) I chose the MAX IOPS cuz well this will be my personal rig for quite some time and I'm assuming they perform better than the regular versions, is there a big performance difference here for the money?

thoughts and opinions welcome, thanks in advance

Overall nice build I would make a few changes though.

First that mobo is excessive it MIGHT squeek out a little more performance than say an asrock extreme 3 or gigabyte/asus equiv but IMO not enough to justify its cost. Really the maximus ect are intended for high end benchers who are going sub zero AND need many GPUs.

16GB of RAM? 8gb will probably suit your needs now and in the future. Running 2 sticks lessens the load on the IMC(memory controller) and generally allows much better ram tuning/performance.

SSD the max iops is good stuff. I could be wrong here but we often here alot of argument against SSDs in raid. The reason is that while it increases the throughput of the drive it reduces the IOPS and increases latency. I would grab just one of those SSD or if you need 256GB then I would go for a single 256 max iops.

850w should handle a pair of 560s + overclocking no problems.

good luck.

I definitely want to stick with an asus board, I've had great experience with them and back them all the way and oh yea i also forgot to say i like the look of the board with the whole red/black theme and also the new bios setup which did factor into my decision

with that said the MIVE-Z/Gen 3 board gives me the same things and would save me a lot of money but sacrifice some performance....I've noticed some great reviews with that board too should i lean more toward that? or would i get better performance out of the asus p8 lineup which are comparable in price with the MIVE-Z/Gen 3?

I was up in the air with the 16gb ram/8gb but with the current system (see signature) for some reason I was only able to get 4.2Ghz stable once I popped in 12gb ram...at 4gb i had 4.0Ghz stable but the system was not running smooth at all, upped to 8gb and it got smoother but still no higher than 4.0Ghz and there was still moments the system felt bottle-necked, only till I upped to 12gb did it really open up...hit 4.2Ghz no problem and I feel absolutely no lag/bottle necking anywhere except a slow HDD.

I will put a minimum of 12gb (I rather overkill there than deal with future upgrading especially for 20-40 bucks)

I will defiantly go with the 850, that was my first choice but I just didn't want to be cutting it close which is why i considered the 1050.

I've read that with the updated controllers that raid ssd's aren't as bad as it used to be but I also have never tested the setups, do you think 1x256gb max iops would outperform the 2x120gb in raid though? even with the reduced iops and latency issues your aware of?

This is how I breakdown SSDs. They are for your main OS and programs right? the OS and programs are collections of lots and lots of very small files, therefore IO per second and latency are key. You wont be streaming very large files off of that drive. So the throughput advantage of RAID pretty much becomes moot, especially with these drives already doing 500+ Mb/sec. Could the raid be faster? in some areas probably. Will you be able to tell? unlikely. I can barely tell the difference between the sata 2 SSD in my FX rig and the sata3 SSD in my wifes system. Ya her windows loads a few seconds faster than mine but the difference between opening normal files or programs is so small I cant tell.

The P8Z68 asus line maybe the middle range one is going to yeild you 98% of the same overclock / tuning as the maximus. However, this is one of those personal choice deals. My 990XA does very well in my rig and yet I just sold it to order a 990FX just because the PCB is black instead of blue so....